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Concept
Personal carbon trading
Summary
Carbon rationing, as a means of reducing CO2 emissions to contain climate change, could take any of several forms. One of them, personal carbon trading, is the generic term for a number of proposed emissions trading schemes under which emissions credits would be allocated to adult individuals on a (broadly) equal per capita basis, within national carbon budgets. Individuals then surrender these credits when buying fuel or electricity. Individuals wanting or needing to emit at a level above that permitted by their initial allocation would be able to purchase additional credits in the personal carbon market from those using less, creating a profit for those individuals who emit at a level below that permitted by their initial allocation.
Some forms of personal carbon trading (carbon rationing) could be an effective component of climate change mitigation, with the economic recovery of COVID-19 and new technical capacity having opened a favorable window of opportunity for initial test runs of such in appropriate regions, while many questions remain largely unaddressed. However, carbon rationing could have a larger effect on poorer households as "people in the low-income groups may have an above-average energy use, because they live in inefficient homes".
Proposals include:
Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) – devised by environmental writer David Fleming, who first published the idea in 1996 under its former name Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs). The UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has been researching this scheme since 2003, and more recently the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) through its CarbonLimited project. The system has been the subject of a UK government funded feasibility study in 2008, an All Party Parliamentary Group report in 2011, and a European Commission debate in 2018.
Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) – described in the book "How we can save the planet" by Mayer Hillman and Tina Fawcett. Work on PCAs is ongoing at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, UK.
Official source
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